I wasn't going to post anything more about the Phoenix Lander, as the media's picked it up now, and I don't have a lot to add.

But then, I saw this photo..

It's Phoenix decelerating with its parachute in the Martian atmosphere, taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Not a high quality image, but there's something totally awesome about this. It's not just telemetry and indirect guesses - that's a man-made probe, landing on an alien world, and we can actually see it.

If you're not in awe of that, what exactly does it take?

via The Planetary Society

A set of photos taken during the recent earthquake in Sichuan province, China, by a wedding photographer who'd just begun taking photos of the bride and groom when the earthquake struck.

Two strike me in particular - one of masonry falling off a church, the other of the bride, resplendent in dress, veil, and dusty debris looking out over the rubble as her new husband is climbing to his feet.

It seems their photos were being taken on some steps outside the church, within which many of their guests remained. You can only imagine the shock - they've just experienced an intensely joyful experience, then, having only recently left the church to have photos taken, they experience horror, as the building, filled with friends and family, collapses behind them. 33 are reported missing or dead.

Photos like this, untouched by professional media, give, for me, a much more intense window into events - it was easy to see imagery of rescue workers and devastation on the news and think of it as a distant tragedy, a statistic - this brings it all into so much more focus.

In the post mentioned above, Jamais says 'With every snapshot, every recording, every blog entry, we're documenting our world.' - that's important - it emphasizes the breadth of documentary that crowd journalism can give - if everyone has a camera and a voice, so much more is captured, and so many more perspectives are presented. That said, I think crowd journalism is similarly important for the personal, immediate nature of it - there's an increase in perceived honesty and emotional intensity that you get when you're seeing footage and accounts by people who were actually there, experiencing the event. To some extent, I think this is what makes embedded journalism during wartime so interesting, too..

For those who like pretty astronomical pictures..

ESO has a press release out with several photos of interesting solar phenomena, including the rare green flash and even rarer blue flash, both caused by the earth's atmosphere acting as a prism when the sun's light hits it with a very low grazing angle at sunrise or sunset. More in wikipedia

They've also got photos of the zodiacal light and Gegenschein, both caused by solar light reflecting of interplanetary dust..

For those not so fascinated by astronomy, here's a bunny.

I finally got around to sorting some more photos and posting them.

• Snakes and lizards at the Oslo Reptile Park - gotta love corn snakes, pythons, and caimans. Not to mention spiders..
• A swastika made out of rifles from the Norwegian Resistance Museum
• Excessive gem collections at the Natural History Museum of London
• Squirrel! in Hyde Park
• The Prince Albert and Queen Vic memorials, both extremely pretentious..
• Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, the London Eye and County Hall, and the Battersea Power Station, among other prominent London landmarks.
• Tanks! Tanks! more Tanks! Not to mention a tank destroyer, a Spitfire and a Pak38, all at the Imperial War Museum.
• Many planes at the Museum of Flight in Seattle
• Queues, gamers, dancing storm troopers, and impressively costumed furries with wings. Plus GenCon staff in really scary 80s costumes.

I've also uploaded the few photos of last weekend's 'Arabian Nights' performance that I thought were acceptable. Unfortunately, many of them were too dark or too smoky to use. However, there's a pretty good one of hedonistacal, and you can make out misplaced_ice and sulkandburn in others. There's only one photo of the fire dancing, but I got a large portion of it on video, too, though I have yet to process it for upload.

And I took some photos of my port-a-garden, not that it's even remotely impressive yet..